Australian rancher David Green leaves court a free man after being found innocent of rape.Steven Hirsch

Australian rancher David Green’s New York City nightmare finally ended today — and now, he says, he’ll file a one-million-dollar lawsuit against the two women whose false accusations of date rape landed him in Rikers for a year and a half.

“They took 18 months from me,” Green said as he left Manhattan Supreme Court this afternoon.

“I was her scapegoat,” Green said of Elizabeth Roarke, the now 28-year-old Long Island speech pathologist who, five years ago, told cops Green raped her at the Affinia Hotel.

Green was sentenced today to one year jail — essentially time served, meaning he could remain free — for the last lingering vestige of the rape arrest: his December felony conviction for drunkenly throwing beer bottles off the hotel’s roof on the morning of the incident.

But the Aussie’s odyssey through New York’s criminal justice system began five years ago, during a vacation trip to the city with his Down Under buddy, Scott O’Donnell.

Green and his pal had met Roarke and her friends by chance, at the Fat Black Pussy Cat bar in Greenwich Village, and they drank there until four in the morning.

Green has always maintained that Roarke and one of Roarke’s girlfriends then came back to their hotel consensually. At daybreak, Green and his pal filmed each other on their cell phones as they took turns hurling beer bottles some off the hotel roof, some two-dozen floors down onto Seventh Avenue.

At the December trial, Roarke testified that at 8 a.m, she woke to find Green on top of her in the bed. She also conceded telling cops she believed Green had given her a date-rape drug — a claim disproven by her subsequent blood test.

“There was a man on top of me, having sex with me,” Roarke told jurors. She started screaming, and her girlfriend, who was in the same room, with O’Donnell, joined in the outcry. The two women went downstairs, where they alerted cops who’d arrived at the hotel to investigate the falling beer bottles.

Green was arrested on the spot, but skipped bail, returning to his family’s ranch in Australia for three years until, as his lawyer Ron Fischetti puts it, “He foolishly tried to renew his passport, and the New York arrest warrant popped up.”

Green was extradited back to the U.S. in Sept. of 2009, remaining in jail for 18 months until a jury, after a day and a half of deliberations, acquitted him. In going to trial, he had risked a maximum of ten years prison.

“He rejected a plea offer of three-and-a-half-years prison, because he knew he didn’t do this,” Fischetti said.

Defense lawyer Ronald Fischetti said he’ll file suit against Roarke and her friend — seeking $1 million in damages — either tomorrow or next week.

“I think it was done out of fear,” Green said of Roarke’s accusations.

“She had a boyfriend at the time. She was supposed to be sleeping at a friend’s. She had issues with cocaine and alcohol. I think she woke up where she shouldn’t have been, confused, and concocted a story.

“And I was her scapegoat.”

Today, Manhattan prosecutors asked, unsuccessfully, that he be jailed on the tossed bottles for two-and-a-half to seven years, the max allowed for felony reckless endangerment. O’Donnell, meanwhile, had received just a $500 fine for the same offense.

“They wanted to sentence him on the rape, which he’d been acquitted of,” Fischetti complained afterward. “He was absolutely innocent.”

Of his time lost in protective custody at Rikers, Greene is philosophical.

“It was very challenging,” he said. “There was a rabbi there for child molestation. There were quite a few horrific murderers, rapists, pedophiles, Columbia drug traffickers — you name it.

“Actually, they were quite nice,” he added. “They all had a good heart.”